Winter Carnival: Vulcans' Snow Park becoming festival of its own

David White scrapes the chin of a enormous ogre head, part of a gigantic snow carving at the State Fairgrounds in Falcon Heights, on Tuesday, January 21, 2014 which he is carving with Pat Mogren. The sculpture, at the site of the St. Paul Winter Carnival snow sculpture competition on Machinery Hill, depicts three ogres and a dragon. Mogren and White, who have carved snow sculptures all over the country, have been working on the carving, which measures 15 feet high by 50 feet long, since Monday January 13th. (Pioneer Press: Scott Takushi)

Just a couple weeks before the start of the 2008 St. Paul Winter Carnival, organizers gave their 20-year-old snow sculpting competition the ax.

The contest, which long played second fiddle to the carnival's ice sculpting spectacle, was going the way of ice palaces and snow slides due to a lack of funds.

Enter the Vulcans and a night at a steak house.

"About 40 guys from Fire and Brimstone (the fraternal group for former Vulcans) got together at Mancini's, raised the money and put it together in about two weeks," said Dan Klingner, Count of Ashes 2002. "We've been doing it ever since."

Seven years later, the snow sculpting draws hundreds of spectators to its home on the State Fairgrounds.

"It's Bee-ginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" by Tim Trost of Goodhue, Jared Trost of Hastings and Jim Krueger of East Bethel won first place in the Winter Carnival contest at the State Fairgrounds in Falcon Heights.

This year, the Vulcans have added a giant snow slide, absent from the winter festivities since 2007.

"That first year, it was just the sculptures and a snow maze. Our budget was $7,000," Klingner said. "This year it's quite a bit more."

Most of the park is created with volunteer labor and materials, like the snow maker from Green Acres Recreation in Lake Elmo used to make the competition blocks, or the scaffolding for the 14-feet-high, 200-feet-long slide from Custom Drywall in St. Paul.

There's a trailer, always warm, loaded with food and soft drinks for competitors and workers.

For the first time, the Snow Park will have a heated tent on site with food from Giggles Campfire Grill for sale inside. As usual, a kettle corn vendor will sell bags of salty-sweet popcorn nearby.

"We're trying to make it more of a festival," Klingner said. "There's always more that we want to do, but it's what we have time to do and manpower to do."

The entire park will be illuminated with colored lights and filled with music courtesy of wireless speakers strung around the lot.

"As a competitor, this place is phenomenal," said David White, chopping into a block of snow with a floor scraper to create a miniature snow slide for kids.

He's competed -- and won -- with fellow snow carver Pat Mogren and their team, Minnesota Big Snow, but this year the pair spent two weeks building the signature snow sculpture in the northwest corner of the park. Three grinning trolls hold up the Winter Carnival logo, as their "dragon-moose-dog" lolls nearby.

"The really nice thing is, we've never really had our own home, and now we have our home," he said.

John Brewer can be reached at 651-228-2093.

If you go

The snow slide will be open from 4 to 9 p.m. weekdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Jan. 26 and noon to 4 p.m. Feb. 2. Visit MNSnowPark.com for more information.